in
spiritual depravity, and shows the Satanic energy of purpose which may
spring from the ruins of the moral will. There is nothing lovable in
Vittoria. She seems, indeed, almost without sensations; and the
affection between her and Brachiano is simply the magnetic attraction
which one evil spirit has for another evil spirit. Francisco, the
brother of Brachiano's wife, says to him:

"Thou hast a wife, our sister; would I had given
Both her white hands to death, bound and locked fast
In her last winding-sheet, when I gave thee
But one."

This is the language of the intensest passion, but as applied to the
adulterous lover of Vittoria it seems little more than the utterance of
reasonable regret; for devil can only truly mate with devil, and
Vittoria is Brachiano's real "affinity."

The moral confusion they produce by their deeds is traced with more than
Webster's usual steadiness of nerve and clearness of vision. The evil
they inflict is a cause of evil in others; the passion which leads to
murder rouses the fiercer passion which aches for vengeance; and at
last, when the avengers of crime have become morally as bad as the
criminals, they are all involved in a common destruction. Vittoria is
probably Webster's most powerful delineation. Bold, bad, proud,
glittering in her baleful beauty, strong in that evil courage which
shrinks from crime as little as from danger, she meets her murderers
with the same self-reliant scorn with which she met her judges. "Kill
her attendant first," exclaimed one of them.

"_Vittoria._ You shall not kill her first; behold my breast:
I will be waited on in death; my servant
Shall never go before me.

"_Gasparo._ Are you so brave!

"_Vittoria._ Yes, I shall welcome death,
As princes do some great ambassadors;
I'll meet thy weapon half-way.

"_Lodovico._ Strike, strike,
With a joint motion.

"_Vittoria._ 'T was a manly blow;
The next thou giv'st, murder some sucking infant,
And then thou wilt be famous."

Webster tells us, in the Preface to "The White Devil," that he does not
"write with a goose-quill winged with two feathers"; and also hints that
the play failed in representation through its being acted in winter in
"an open and black theatre," and because it wanted "a full and
understanding auditory." "Since that time," he sagely adds, "I have
noted most of the people that come to the playhouse resemble